I had a whole different post planned for today. Something cheerful, probably involving a chicken doing something ridiculous or an update on the renovation plans that have been sitting with council long enough to have developed their own ecosystem. But life had other ideas, as it tends to do around here, and instead I find myself sitting down to write the kind of post I hate writing.
We lost our girl Mumu yesterday.
Friday night we found a lump on her neck — not a tick, not obviously a scratch, just there, suddenly, the way alarming things have a habit of appearing without so much as a warning knock. My cousin, who is an actual doctor and therefore infinitely more qualified than the rest of us googling at midnight, thought it might be a blocked salivary gland. Manageable, we told ourselves. Something to sort out first thing Monday.
She never made it to Monday.
Sunday morning she was struggling to breathe, and then, gently, in her mum’s arms, she just… stopped.
Today she went to the pet crematorium. She’ll come home to us in a little urn, which is both comforting and absolutely devastating at the same time, and if you’ve ever lost a pet you’ll know exactly what I mean by that.
The house has been off-kilter ever since. The other cats know — they always know — and they’ve been restless and strange, doing that unsettled prowling thing that cats do when the world has shifted slightly on its axis. We’ve all been sad and grumpy and not particularly useful to anyone, which I think is probably the correct response.
There’s not much else to report from here. The farm ticked along because farms don’t pause for grief, and the guinea fowl continued their ongoing project of being extremely loud about nothing, and I drank more tea than was strictly necessary. That’s about the sum of it.
I hope your last couple of days have been considerably kinder than ours.
Sleep well, sweet girl. 🖤
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